ZOE Science & Nutrition - Why you can't stop eating: The science of cravings, food addiction and 5 ways to regain control | Michael Pollan & Prof Tim Spector

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

If you feel like you can’t stop eating, constantly crave junk food, or struggle with overeating, this episode will change how you see food.  Michael Pollan, one of the world's most influential science writers, joins Professor Tim Spector to explain how ultra-processed food may drive food addiction, override fullness signals, and keep us craving more. Together, they explore why foods high in sugar, salt, and fat can feel so hard to resist, and what we can do to fight back. Michael and Tim unpack how the modern food system changed over the last 50 years, and why many ultra-processed foods are designed around “craveability.” They explain how these foods may stimulate the brain’s reward systems, why fibre and plants help us feel fuller, and why cooking more meals at home may help reduce overeating without calorie counting. The episode includes practical ways to regain control of your eating habits, reduce cravings, feel better and live more healthy years. If your cravings feel impossible to control, is it really a lack of willpower, or is modern food engineered to keep us coming back for more? 🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30 Get our brand-new app and Gut Health Test designed by world-leading gut health and nutrition scientists to build healthy eating habits 👉 Join ZOE Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes 00:00 Intro 04:04 How monoculture changed modern food 08:52 Are we basically made of corn? 12:58 The 3 ingredients engineered to drive cravings 14:32 Why ultra-processed food keeps you hungry 15:44 Why governments subsidize junk food 18:01 How fast food changed family cooking 20:00 Is ultra-processed food destroying family meals? 21:46 What happens when you stop eating plants? 22:55 Your gut microbes are eating too 25:31 Caffeine and the world’s most used drug 26:26 Michael Pollan quits caffeine for 3 months 28:35 Is caffeine addiction actually harmful? 29:11 Coffee and heart disease risk explained 32:34 Why workplaces normalized caffeine 33:40 The simplest way to stop overeating 35:30 Did food companies convince us cooking is hard? 37:02 How to identify ultra-processed food 38:25 Michael Pollan’s famous food rule explained 40:14 Why “plant-based” doesn’t always mean healthy 42:46 The Japanese habit that may reduce overeating 44:24 How food companies engineer craveability 45:25 Are food companies manipulating your cravings? 46:41 Why eating 30 plants a week matters 47:36 Eat food, not too much, mostly plants

Welcome to Zoe Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. 400 million years ago, a profound change began. Plants finally broke free from the sea and began colonising the land. Over millions of years, these early explorers changed the Earth for good. They altered the climate and the atmosphere, paving the way for animals like us. We have always existed in a world surrounded by plants. long before supermarkets, pharmacies and pups, plants fed us, healed us and stimulated us. But today, our relationship with plants is broken.

Industrial agriculture and big food corporations have transformed what grows in our fields. So it is just the starting point for an industrial ecosystem that culminates in ultra-processed food on our plate. Whole plants have gone, and instead we have food that is engineered to be impossible to resist. What are the health implications? And what can we do to add the right plants back into our diets? Michael Pollan is one of the world's most influential science writers. As a six-time best-selling author, he has transformed how millions think about food, plants, and the hidden system shaping what we eat.

His new book, A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness, has just been released. Professor Tim Specter is one of the world's top 100 most-sighted scientists, a professor of epidemiology at King's College London, and my scientific co-founder at Zoe. In today's conversation, Michael and Tim help untangle this story. We discover how food corporations have tricked us into embracing meals without plants, how we end up on the dopamine roller coaster of food addiction, and how plants could be the antidote we all need. Michael, thank you so much for joining me today.

Great to be here. And Tim, it's great to have you also. Likewise. So Michael, we have a tradition here at Zoe, where we always start with a quick-fire round of questions, and we have some very strict rules. You can say yes or no, or if you have to a one-sentence answer.

Okay. Are plants the secret to our health and happiness? Yes. Is it best to avoid foods that have health claims on their pack? In general, yes. Tim, if big food manufacturers tweaked their recipes for ultra-processed foods, could they solve the health problems with them? No.

And Michael, do most of us use a psychoactive drug every single day? Absolutely, yes. Today, I'm really excited to dive into what plants really are, the way that human beings are wired to respond to them, and of course how big food companies have been designing products to take advantage of all that wiring. And Michael, look, you've spent decades studying plants and food. What first took you down this path?

Well, I, you know, I began my writing career as a gardener. So I had that sort of daily interaction with plants, watching them closely, and learning also about their importance to diet. And, you know, when I decided to write a book on consciousness, I didn't think it'd have anything to do with plants. It turns out I got very interested in are plants conscious or not. So it's the through line, I think, of my work is this passion for understanding plants. And they're so weird and different than we are, that they're sort of hard for us to understand. As Darwin said, you know, they're like upside-down animals. Their brain is in their root tips, he thought, and their sexual organs are up on top, just the opposite of us.

And I just have huge respect for them. You know, they are masters of biochemistry. Many of our drugs are based on molecules produced by plants. They've invented molecules that radically change human consciousness. They're just geniuses at biochemistry. I'd really like to start with the modern food system, which came up already. And you've talked quite a lot about this. If you're going to try and explain the problem as you see it today, what is it?

In a word, monoculture, growing too much of the same thing. And in the U.S., it's corn or maize and soybeans. And for most of the agricultural belt in the United States, those two crops take turns in the field. Neither of them are food exactly. They're the raw material for processed food, and they're animal feed, and they're the basis for biofuels. But we grow huge amounts of corn in giant monocultures that would fail, if not for lots of chemical application. Because monocultures are just not the way nature works.

And when you have too much of one thing, you also get too many pests, too many diseases. So, therefore, it drives you to use a lot of chemicals in your agriculture. So I think many of the problems in the whole food system can be traced to that very fact that we grow these vast monocultures. You know, as I mentioned, they're not exactly food. You can't eat the kind of corn we grow. And the soybeans are not etymami. They're a different kind. And they're basically big packets of starch and protein that can be broken down into their component parts and then reassembled as ultra-processed foods or turned into sugar, you know, high-fructose corn syrup, which is where a lot of it ends up.

You can't take a corn cob and eat it. It's like these giant kernels that are incredibly hard. You'd break your teeth. And they're just pure starch. They have none of the sweetness that sweet corn has. You see these vast fields, and they cover Iowa and Indiana and Illinois, and you think, oh, all food. But no, it's not. It has to pass through a factory or several factories before it can be food, although I don't even think what you turn that stuff into should be dignified with the word food.

So there's a direct link between the way we're farming and the way we're eating. When did that change happen? Was it just in the last 20 years or so? A little more than that, 50 years, I'd say. Our agriculture was a lot more diversified before, really, the 70s. During the Nixon administration, there was a real spike in the price of food. There had been a grain deal with the Russians that was kept secret, and when the word came out, grain prices went crazy,

and food inflation became very high, much higher than it is now. And President Nixon knew that if the price of food didn't come down, he wasn't going to get reelected. So he brought in a brilliant agricultural economist named Earl Butts and said, your job is to drive down the price of food. And Butts knew exactly how to do it. And he basically encouraged farmers and changed the incentive structure so that they would plant one crop, a fence row to fence row, is what he said, and consolidate so that if

your neighbor was a weaker player and then you were, you would buy your neighbor out. and the fields got bigger, and the diversity declined. And it worked. We have such overproduction of corn and soy. You know, our problem is not too little food. It's too much food. And so what do you do with that? Well, that's why we started making biofuels to get rid of this excess of corn.

And, you know, this is the basis of the food system. So if you have cheap corn, you're going to have cheap meat and cheap milk and cheap butter. What happens next? You're making this sort of corn that actually humans can't eat directly. Could you talk us through the next step of this master plan? Sure. There is a system for refining that corn that essentially you can break it down into its component parts. And if you look at all the ingredients on a package of ultra-processed food and you see malted dextrin

and high-fructose corn syrup and soy less than, yeah, yeah, all these different manifestations of starch. most of those ingredients can be derived from corn once you've put it through this processing. And in fact, that technology to figure out what you could do with that packet of starch was developed around the same period. And high fructose corn syrup, for example, doesn't really enter the food system in a big way until the early 80s. And that was a, you know, a big discovery that you could make something as sweet as table sugar from corn. So you have, it's called corn refineries that do. all this work. So when I was writing Omnivore's Dilemma where I really looked at this monoculture system, I was amazed how many of the ingredients, if you took a package of Twinkies or something

or a sweetened breakfast cereal and you went through it, and I had a list of what the corn refiners were producing from corn and the soy refiners, there it all was. And you think you're getting many ingredients, but in fact, you're eating corn and soy and mostly corn. A scientist I was working with at the time said that if you took a lock of human hair in America right now, you could determine how much of the carbon in that hair and therefore in that person's body came from corn. And I forget what the figure was, but it was like a majority. And so, you know, we are the carbon life form, right? We're mostly made of carbon. So where does that carbon come from? You can actually trace it back and you can figure out how much of that person comes from corn.

And we are corn walking in the United States. So you're saying the average American is like more than 50% corn. Yeah. I've got this beautiful picture now of like corn going into a big factory in one end and like dozens of different chemicals coming out the other end. Obviously, it doesn't sound very appealing, but is it bad? Hi, Professor Tim Specter here. Have you heard about our documentary The Gut Health Challenge?

We challenged Sarah, Rob, and Lucy to transform their health in just six weeks by improving their gut health. If you've ever wondered how Zoe works, this. This documentary reveals all. When our participants started, they struggled with everything from brain fog and sleep troubles and low energy. Can eating the Zoe Way address these issues and improve their health markers? In just six weeks? You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at Zoe and discover some great, actionable advice from Federica and Sarah.

Follow their journey by searching gut health challenge on YouTube. It's not bad that your carbon came from corn necessarily. I don't think it matters, but it's a reminder that we are the product of what we eat in a very literal way. I think the bigger problem is that these ingredients don't contribute to healthy foods. For the most part, there are ways to sweeten food, bulk it up, and ultra-processed foods we now know are detrimental to our health, and we're eating way too many of them. So it's a bit of a byproduct in a way, isn't it? So you're taking this very crude monoculture, you're breaking into all the bits.

And you say, we've got to use everything. Right. Because otherwise we're losing money. What can we think of? How do we recreate it to something that the consumer is going to buy? And it strikes me as quite similar to the petrochemical industry, where you take gasoline or coal and you convert all these chemicals. And some of them end up as artificial sweeteners, others as plastics. Yeah.

And it's not generally good for us, all this stuff, all these buy products. But industry is now so geared up to use it in some way that it's like. It's like an unstoppable force, isn't it? Yeah, and there's great ingenuity here. I mean, figuring out how to get rid of the surplus corn or extra oil. And get people to buy it. And get people to buy it, yeah. But, I mean, if you step back far enough, you've got an excess of calories coming off the farm,

and then you've got to persuade people to consume those calories. And you do that by sweetening things. If you add sugar or high-fructose corn syrup to anything, people will buy more of it. See, cheap corn is very insidious because, there are products now in the market that never used to have sugar added to them. I'm thinking of tomato sauce or ketchup. And it's very hard to find products that they haven't added some sugar to it. And, you know, there are like 25 different kinds of sugar you can add.

And that's a good way of hiding its predominance on an ingredient label. So the net result is we eat more because we're hardwired to like sweetness. and sweetness has become so cheap. I mean, sugar was precious for most of history. And now it's so common that it's added to just about everything we eat. Tim, you know, we've been focused on this image that I think all of us can imagine of the Midwest and America with the cornfields going on forever. What about the rest of the world? Most of the world said that European Union, you know, Australia, Canada, they're very similar.

Monocultures are the preferred economic model. It might vary slightly, so we have more wheat, for example, than corn. And sugar beet has replaced Caribbean sugar plantations, and they're massively subsidized by the European Union to make sugar equally cheap in Europe as it would be in places close to the Caribbean. It's a worldwide problem now that, you know, the US, as often started it off, show how people could get rich on this, how big corporations. could make even more money and how all these byproducts could be sold to consumers. And, yeah, the rest of the world has a sweet tooth as well as has absolutely embraced it. Many people say they feel like they can't stop eating certain ultra-processed foods. Tim, can these foods genuinely override our body's sort of normal control systems?

They can, and they're specifically designed to do that because, as Michael said, they're created in laboratories. by brilliant scientists who have had decades of trial and error to perfect their art to get this blend, particularly of three ingredients, sugar, salt and fat, in that perfect combination that's called the bliss point that lights up the brain, the pleasure centres that are receptive to things like dopamine, and causes something similar to what happens in most cases of addiction, whether it's, you know, that big buzz from a cigarette or a drug or heroin or morphine or opiates. And as well as that signal, it also seems to override the fullness signals. We're learning this from the GLP1 drugs, you know, the Azempic type drugs that are out there that work mainly

on that pathway. And we call this hyper-pallitability. So that's a way of describing these foods, is that they override the normal body's response, which is to feel full. And that's, in a way, why these products are so dangerous is because we overconsume them in ways that our evolution and our genes have not prepared us for. And it's all happened in the last 50 years or so. There's certainly a proportion of the population that are just constantly craving these foods. So they're just thinking about it all the time. It's like 24 hours a day, a bit like someone who,

into cigarettes. Yeah, and they get on this roller coaster of glucose response, and I was always a little reluctant to use the word addiction. I thought it was more metaphoric when it came to food compared to drug addiction or cigarette addiction. But in fact, from the researchers I've talked to, it's a fair description and that you have the kind of dopamine release that's often associated with an addictive drug. So if you accept the dopamine model of addiction, I think you have to include food. I've often wondered like, okay, these food companies are trying to get us to eat their food. Doesn't your mom do that too when she cooks you a beautiful meal? And I realized, no, it's a different game.

She wants to satisfy you. She doesn't want to fill you up necessarily or addict you to her food. And being satisfied is different than being full. And the food industry is really trying to get us to eat as much as possible. That's their goal, is using our bodies to dispose of this surplus. And the other thing we haven't talked about is how cheap these foods are. I mean, given their complexity, it's remarkable how inexpensive they are. But that goes back to your point about subsidies.

This is the kind of food that gets subsidized. The EU and the U.S. government are subsidizing the least healthy calories in the diet. They're subsidizing the worst things for us to eat. Yes, the worst things for us to eat. Whole foods, produce, they're not subsidizing. Because people often talk about, well, isn't it more expensive to eat, whole food. And we've talked about that actually on this podcast quite often, and the answers often seem to be no. But what you're saying is, one of the reasons is because our governments are actually

subsidizing. It's artificially cheap. The price of a hamburger or French fries at McDonald's is partly being picked up by the taxpayers. It's extraordinary. And it's very hard to subsidize whole foods, because whenever you subsidize something, as we learn from the monocultures of corn and soil, you get over production. And that's fine with grain because you can store grain for at least five years if you get too much of it and wait for the market to recover. You subsidize broccoli and you've got a sloppy mess on your hand. There's nothing you can do. So could we talk through for a minute what's happened over these last 50 years on the like the big food manufacturing side? Yeah, I mean, they have moved to a culture of ready to eat foods.

they're counting on the fact that there's less cooking happening. And the way to eat whole foods economically, of course, is to cook them. If you buy raw ingredients and cook them, that is competitive with buying ready to eat foods. But many of us aren't cooking anymore. We don't have the time, or so we tell ourselves, or the two partners are both working. Commute times are longer. So we're looking for solutions to a problem, which is not enough time to cook a beautiful meal. most nights, and the food industry stepped in.

It's often been said that that was a result of feminism beginning in the 60s and 70s. But that story is a little too simple. There was definitely, with the feminist revolution, there was a lot of argument in households about childcare, house cleaning, and cooking. And the division of labor had to change. It was under enormous pressure.

but the food industry saw this as an opportunity, and they recognized that they could step in and solve the problem. There was a famous billboard that got at this. KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken, had billboards around the country, and was just a bucket of fried chicken, and with a very simple headline, Women's Liberation. So they associated fast food with freedom for women. And this ended this conversation between men and women

over who should cook or how to divide labor, And we should have completed that conversation and redivided labor in the house. But instead, we just turned to this easy out, which was more prepared foods. I've been arguing in favor of cooking for many reasons. I think many things happen when you cook food at home. For one thing, everybody eats the same thing. Whereas when you're using processed foods very often, and I've seen this, it's marketed this way. You know, that the young boy goes for the frozen pizza and the teenage girls.

has a salad or the mother has a salad, and then there's a manhandler TV dinner for the dad. And they want to divide and conquer us. So they market very directly to different genders and different ages. Whereas if you're cooking, everybody eats from the same platter. And there's something psychologically beautiful

about that, sharing food. And I remember once going to a big food manufacturer, I think it was General Mills, and they hired these anthropologists to study the family meal. And if you ask people, they'll still say, oh, yeah, we have a family meal. But they would actually have these volunteer families

and they put cameras above their dining room table to see how they actually ate meals. And the way it worked was the mother had a salad and sat there for an hour. And different other members of the family came and went and would microwave their own meal and sit down with the mom for a little bit and then wander off.

They weren't there at the same. time. It made for an incredibly disjointed family meal, but people still said, yeah, we have family meal. I see the industry as deliberately undermining family meal, and I see family meals as one of the most important institutions of our culture. It's, I mean, think about what happens at that table. You know, it's where we learn how to share and take turns and argue without fighting the values. I mean, one of the things I wrote, I refer to the family dinner table as the nursery of democracy. And to lose this to the food industry's greed is just a tragedy. I think it's sad at a cultural and political level, but it's obviously a disaster from a health

point of view because we now know these foods don't give the body everything it needs. Then you get into this category of children's food, which is historically a very new thing. It used to be children ate the same thing adults ate. And now you go to any restaurant and they have a menu for kids, you know, and look at that food. It's always chicken fingers and French fries and hamburgers and pizza. From an English-speaking world perspective, that's absolutely true. But when you do travel, you do realize that, you know, the rest of the world don't distinguish diets for kids and adults. Yeah, and I think it's a really unhealthy development, and I hope it doesn't spread.

What's so powerful about plants and what have we lost? Plants are very important to human health. Every cell in a plant has a wall. And that wall is what we call fiber. And the microbes that inhabit our gut, our large intestine, that's their preferred food. So that if you're not eating plants, you're not feeding your microbiome. And that's critically important. There's a huge loss when you take plants out of the diet.

And I think we're paying the price for that. So if we think about it as what we could do to get back to where we want, what can plants give us? Well, first of all, when you're eating plants, you're getting all this bulk. So you're getting fewer calories per bite per unit of food, which is very helpful with weight. One of the problems with ultra-processed food is so caloric, it's so dense in calories that for every bite, since there's so little water, so little fiber, you're getting many more calories. And before your satiety signals can tell you you're full. Eating plants kind of slows down this whole process and adds bulk to it. Plants also are full of nutrients that you're not getting from ultra-processed food. All plants have

antioxidants, a variety of them, because antioxidants help them deal with the stress of photosynthesis. Antoxidants are very important to our health, too. And vitamins, I mean, plants are just, you know, a storehouse of necessary nutrients. People on the podcast were no polyphenols. Yeah. is how we tend to cool antioxidants these days. The defense chemicals in plants that they actually fuel for our gut microbes as well. You know, what's going on in the microbiome is it's like this chemical factory, pharmaceutical factory, hundreds of thousands of metabolites are produced. But these, it turns out, are very important to our well-being,

and they're influencing the brain in ways we're just beginning to understand. I think we have to remember that when we're eating, we're not just feeding our body. You know, we have these, you know, 100 trillion or whatever the number is, microbes that also need to be fed. And, you know, we're eating not even just for two. We're eating for millions. I'd love to pick up on this point about plants affecting our minds and not just our body. And I understand that, you know, humans have been doing this for thousands of years. And could we maybe start with the most widely used psychoactive drug on Earth, as you mentioned, caffeine?

You've really looked at this in some detail and indeed, I think, decided to quick, caffeine at some point. Could you tell us about that, Michael? Well, caffeine is probably my favorite drug, and we don't think of it as a drug. We think of coffee and tea as drinks, but it is a drug, and it affects the mind in powerful ways. I was taking this addictive drug every day, and I was interviewing an expert on drug abuse, Roland Griffith. He died a couple years ago, but he was very influential psychopharmacologist and did a lot of the early work on psychedelics there. before he got interested in psilocybin as a therapeutic aid, he was an expert on caffeine. I was interviewing him, and he said, you know, to understand your relationship to any drug,

you have to give it up for a period of time because you can't think about it objectively while you're hooked, essentially. So, okay, I guess I better do this. And I was writing an audio book on caffeine. So I gave up caffeine for three months. It was one of the hardest things I've overdone. Sounds brutal. It was. I was a daily coffee drinker, but I also drank a lot of green tea, and the first few days were hell. Some people have flu-like symptoms. I didn't have this. I just, I felt like I was jet-lagged or something. And get the headaches? I got the headaches, definitely. And I was kind of miserable, and I had no focus at all. It was really unpleasant. And I was undergoing withdrawal. Even though after this 10 days of withdrawal, I didn't feel myself.

which was really weird. And I realized I felt more myself on this drug than I did off it. And so, like, what's that about? Like, how it had really become that integral to how I lived and perceived the world. So it got me in touch with how powerful this is. But it was worth it, not just for the story value. It was worth it because the first cup I had after going back on was fantastic. I mean, so much better than coffee is normally that I recommend a caffeine fast just for the pleasure of that first cup.

And I was like, how can I keep this going? You know, I want to enjoy this experience. And I thought for a long time, well, I'm just going to have coffee one day a week. And that worked for a couple weeks. But then I had a deadline on a Thursday. And I was like, you know, caffeine would really get me over the hurdle. So I started making exceptions, like any addict, basically. and before long I was down the slippery slope and back to my daily habit.

But isn't that the real Michael Pollan with caffeine? Thank you. Which is the real one? The real one is with caffeine. When we talk about drugs and we talk about addiction, there's a moral connotation to it. But in fact, from what I can tell, there's really no downside to a caffeine addiction up to a certain point. There's been actually a lot of research showing that it may not be caffeine, but the caffeine-containing plant, like coffee and tea, have lots of polyphenols,

and that actually show evidence of helping with things like Parkinson's disease, with dementia, and depression, up to a certain point. If you're above eight cups a day, the curve changes, and you're at greater risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide. The epidemiology's strongest probably for heart disease, that having up to six cups a day can reduce your risk of heart disease by 25 to 30%. Wow. It's really interesting. And Tim, could you ever give up coffee?

I've tried. I haven't quite managed to shift it, but I do realize that some of the benefits of coffee you can get from having the decaffeinated one. So perhaps there is a middle ground where you might be still having three to four cups of coffee a day, but maybe half of them are decaffeinated. We do know that a lot of people are super sensitive to caffeine and can't tolerate it. They get jittery, and this varies between men and women. It varies at different ages.

It varies if you're smoker or non-smoker. It varies if you're taking the contraceptive pill. All these kind of things can have a big influence, and it changes as you get older. So, you know, I used to be a tea drinker, and I switched to being a coffee drink, interestingly. And tea drinking is a softer hit. Everyone describes the fact that you get this caffeine release, it's slightly mellower.

So you don't get that sudden jolt that you do with, as you have that espresso in the morning. So people who like that feeling, perhaps like yourself, you know, like a mellower drug that brings them into the day slower. So I think everyone, you know, finds what they like. But it is interesting. Even in the UK land of tea drinkers, we're now majority coffee drinkers. Yeah. Well, the coffee here has gotten so much better. It was pretty dreadful.

It was. It's very good right now. I mean, I feel that in both the UK and the US had just about the worst coffee, right? So we had a long way to go, but I think it has got a lot better. It's true. Yeah, and green tea in particular, I think, has another compound in it that kind of spreads out the effect over a longer. So it is mellower. It's definitely mellower.

You know, it probably makes sense to drink both because they have different polyphenols. Yeah, no, I think that's probably the mistake we make is just by. fixating on one source of caffeine. And if we did have green tea, matcha, and perhaps black tea as well. And if I had a decaffeinated coffee, only decaffeinated coffee, will I still get the health benefits that you're talking about? As far as we know, the data isn't superb, but when they have looked at people who only drink decaffeinated coffee, they still see some of the heart benefits. So we think the modern processes do keep most of those polyphenols when they decaffeinate. They've got a lot better than they were 20 years ago. And so, yes, I think you can get most of the benefits.

It's not sure whether it's 100%, but certainly majority of the benefits from decaf. When I'm drinking a coffee, or tea, there's a lot of stuff in it. Like, that whole package is really good for my health. It's fermented, yeah. It's a fermented bean or whatever, yes. And one of the things in it is the caffeine. That's the thing that's probably really making me addicted, makes me feel wired. But it's not necessarily the caffeine that's actually giving me the sort of the long-term health benefits, even if it might be, Michael, as you're saying, the thing that makes me feel great about myself in the day. But that is a benefit. And there's also the benefit of focus. I mean, like any kind of stimulant, basically, it helps you, you know, able to block out a lot of distraction. And that's why it's so useful for work. I mean, you know, the history of the coffee brings. I mean, you know, the history of the coffee. think about it. You have companies giving their employees time off and a free drug every day, twice a day in a lot of American companies. Why are they doing that? It makes workers more productive.

I never thought about it like that. It suddenly sounds really dystopian. We're going to give you this drug for free, so you're going to work harder. That's basically how it started. I'd love now to pull this all together because we've sort of almost had these two strands through this conversation, which has been fascinating, between this ultra-processed food, this completely new way of growing food and making it. And the other hand, this story about plants and how we've coexisted with them and some of the remarkable things that they do. And so I'd love to sort of pull this together and say, okay, we're all living now in this

very unnatural food environment. That's sort of clear. So what are the sorts of diets that people should be aiming for if they can sort of switch off all the marketing from companies just trying to make money off them. And how can we sort of sidestep that? And I think it can feel really hopeless. And I have this conversation quite often with people. Michael, what would you say to, you know, an individual who's saying, I want to make changes. Like, what should I be doing? I put a lot of emphasis on cooking. If you're cooking one day a week, try to cook two days a week. I think being incremental in the changes is really important and

not as daunting as saying, well, you've got to cook a meal every night of the week. A lot of people can't do that. So if you're cooking, you're automatically eating better food, even if you're frying it, you know, whatever you're doing, it's going to be better than ultra-processed food. And you don't have to worry about counting calories or nutrients. All those things kind of take care of themselves with home-cooked food. I think also we've complicated cooking in our heads. I mean, we've lost the transmission of cooking from one generation to the other. We've also lost I don't know about in the UK, but in the US, we used to have what we called Home Economics classes, where, and it was totally gendered, and the girls learned how to cook, and the boys

learned how to make a Japanese lamp. And that's what I remember. We need to bring that back, but, you know, for both, for both genders, I think, because the parents may not know how to cook anymore. That's the same in the UK. They got rid of it a few years ago, and there's no cooking taught in schools. Yeah, I mean, what a shame. One of the things that strikes me now looking at this in 2026 is actually how mindful cooking is. And we live in this world, right? These devices are so addictive and you're pulled in. Like, I think this is worse than the caffeine.

And there's something about cooking. And the reality is you can get a lot of ingredients now that make this quite quick, right? It's completely different from... Yeah, you can get your onion already sliced. And there's nothing wrong with that. Right. Yeah, exactly. So there are advantages.

There's a lot of convenience offered. But it's also, why did we decide that cooking was such a chore? I mean, it can be a great pleasure also. Part of it was the industry convinced us it was a chore and it was really hard. So that's one strategy. I think that's really interesting. I mean, I definitely grew up in a household where cooking was, you know, gendered, as you said, my mother did all the cooking.

And I think that I never realized that actually it can be quite fun. Honestly, like disconnected you from your devices for 15, 20, minutes. It's some of the favorite time of the day. My wife and I cook together. We have an island in the middle of the kitchen and we divvy up the chores. She'll make the main or the side and you know, vice versa. And we catch up on our day and it's a great pleasure. And, you know, my son doesn't think of cooking as gendered at all. I mean, he grew up in a household where both parents were cooking. And we required him to contribute to the meal that do something. It could just be like mince a clove of garlic or wash the salad or something, but he had to do something

no matter how busy he was to contribute to the meal. And that's also, you know, we have to think about our kids and what habits we're teaching them around food. I had a question for Michael. In your earlier books, you described ultra-processed food, one of the sort of first descriptions of it as I think it was something that your grandmother wouldn't recognize his food. Now that was a while ago now. One of the advice is, you know, try and avoid ultra-processed foods, but it's increasingly difficult for people to recognize what they really are and what the worst ones are. I've thought about that a lot. So I wrote a series of food rules that I published as a book called Food Rules to help people identify what food they should be eating. And what I was getting at with like,

don't eat any foods your grandmother or great-grandmother wouldn't recognize is that traditional diets are almost all healthy. They've been designed. over time to give people what they need. And whether it's the Mediterranean diet or even the traditional American diet or UK diet, these traditional diets are better than ultra-processed food. So if your grandmother or great-grandmother doesn't recognize it as food, watch out. But other rules I came up with if there are more than five ingredients. I mean, it's kind of an arbitrary number, but ultra-processed food has a long list of ingredients.

If there are ingredients that a normal person doesn't keep in their pantry, like, you know, multidextrin, nobody has that. Nobody knows what it is. That's to be avoided. If it has ingredients, your third grader can't pronounce, that should be avoided. You know, the way I define ultra-processed food is foods you need a factory to make that contain ingredients no normal person has in their pantry. So that's a very folk definition. but I think it's helpful. And so my overall advice, after studying nutrition for many decades, is so simple.

And I'm often asked, what would you change? You know, it's simply eat food, by which I mean real food, food as we've understood it for tens of thousands of years, not too much, and mostly plants. And I think the only thing I might change in that is, I think fermented foods are very important. I think we're learning that. And so among those plant foods, some should be fermented. The mostly plants is what pisses off people on both sides of the vegetarian divide. Vegans and vegetarians are like, why not all plants?

And carnivores are like, the nerve, he doesn't mention meat. But I think that mostly has a lot of wisdom in it. I don't, you know, there's nothing evil about meat. Meat is a nutritious food. I think, at least in the U.S., we eat way too much of it for our own good or for the good of the environment, which is a bigger concern when it comes to meat. It's just a terrible way to produce food, very inefficient and huge climate implications. And this is talking to many experts, many doctors.

That's what it comes down to. Tim, what are your thoughts to that? I mean, Michael really set the standard for what we should discuss as real food. And I think that's probably what you're still most known for, that mantra. But it's increasingly difficult because the food companies are obviously aware of this and are doing everything they can to disguise this and make it look like something your grandmother would recognize. That's right. So when you said this 20 years ago, they weren't quite as clued up now.

So the packets will now have pictures of happy farmers and wheat fields, only five ingredients. And we assume if it's plant-based, it has to be good, but, you know, sugar's a plant. So if it says plant-based, that doesn't mean that it meets your requirement to be healthy? I would still read the ingredient label and see what plants they're talking about. And this is back to your saying, well, it could all be from that corn. Yeah, that is a plant. So it's difficult. So I think the consumer is really faced with this great battle,

and that's in a way why the Zoe team came up with this new way of describing ultra-processed foods with the app to try and categorize all these foods, which is 50 to 60% of all the foods we eat into different categories of risk, because it's really hard to avoid everything. Yeah, that's right. I agree. And so we've worked out through looking at hyper-pallotability, which we've discussed, the bliss point, through the energy density,

through the fact that you can eat these incredibly fast, and they've got harmful additives. You've got these different categories in there. So you can actually do this scientifically. So I think we need to be using the tools, modern tools like apps, to try and combat the enormous power of the food industry in their marketing, because it is difficult to rely, I think, now on the grandma rule. Yeah, I was struck by that because before I met Tim,

I basically fed my son on these like hot cross buns, which for people outside the UK, how would you describe that, Tim? It's a bit like an English muffin or something with a bit of sugar on the top and raisins in it. And my grandmother definitely made those and recognized them. In fact, I scanned one of these just this week, just to double check, high risk ultra-processed food, because when you turned it over, it's got this extraordinary list of ingredients. But on the front, it looks just like this beautiful thing that, you know, my grandmother would have made. And so it is hard, isn't it, Michael? It is hard.

I mean, foods that look like foods, like bread, package-slice bread, you know, you can make bread with like three ingredients, but look at what's in bread now. They don't have time to leaven it. So they put in chemicals that leaven it like this. They want to take. to be, you know, last and not get stale for like 10 days. So there are all these preservatives in it, and then they're colorings. And so you do have to be careful with traditional foods and looking at the ingredient label. And you see, is it really bred as you understood it or as your grandmother understood it? Or is it some very complicated ultra-processed food masquerading as a traditional food?

Do you know someone who's looking for simple tips to improve their health and change what they eat? If so, I think they might find Michael Pollan's simple advice can genuinely improve their health. You talked about cooking. You've talked about sort of turning the food over and looking at the label. Any other tips for how we sort of navigate this world? In my food rules, I've also talked about the preparation and the actual eating of food. Many cultures have rules about when you should stop eating. Hari-hachebu is something they say in Japan. Eat until you're 80% full. That's to an American. That's such a rapid.

radical idea. We've been taught to eat until you're full. But if you look at like the French language, what we say to our kids, are you full? Whereas in France, they say, are you satisfied? And that's such a different point in the process. Science is one way of understanding food, and culture is another. And there is a lot of wisdom there we're not taking advantage of. Ultra-processed food, you alluded to this. We take in a lot of calories quickly and almost too quickly for the satiety symptoms or method to catch up with it. If you eat really fast, and so slowing down you're eating, and going back to something you said about coffee,

keep in mind the first bite is the most delicious and savor that first bite. And as you eat more and more, the pleasure declines. So linger with that first few bites and enjoy that. And the slower you eat, the more time there is for your bite, to catch up with what you're doing and send you that satiety signal. There's so much I've learned over, you know, the last few years. But one thing that I was really struck by was this sort of ultra-processed food has a very strong

taste right at the beginning. Yes. But then very little lingering flavor. So actually, like, eating it slowly doesn't really make sense because you're getting the benefit right away. Is that true? Yeah, I think that is true. I think it's been engineered to be like instantly appealing.

And a lot of that is, as you said, sugar, fat and salt. And there is this immediate gratification. But of course, we don't stop. We keep eating it. And it's been engineered for what the food marketers call craveability. Cravability. Cravability. And snackability, that's another saying of theirs, that they use internally.

Cravability sounds like a good thing if I'm selling it, but not such a good thing if I'm consuming it. You know, cravings are desires you've lost control of, right? And so, you know, again, your parents aren't cooking. for you to crave their food, they're cooking to satisfy you. And it's a whole different standard. I think the danger is once they're in your house, the food companies have won. So the key is to not actually put them in your basket and take them home.

They're trying to manipulate you into buying their food and eating their food and coming back for more. And, you know, when you think about it that way, we don't like being manipulated. It was when we were told that we were being manipulated on cigarettes that, you began to build a political movement to stop it. Young people in particular don't like to be manipulated. And so exposing those manipulations, I think it's an important job for journalists. And there's been a lot of really good journalism about food. Michael Moss has done some great books on how the industry, he's gotten in the industry.

And they know exactly what they're doing. You think they are intentionally manipulating us in the way that the tobacco companies did before them? Yes. First of all, there are a lot of the same companies, right? the tobacco companies bought food companies beginning in the 70s or 80s when tobacco came under pressure. They diversified. The documents are being destroyed now, whereas their mistake in cigarettes was all these documents existed and were subpoenaed, and we saw that they were lying when they said, no, cigarettes are not addictive and don't cause cancer, because internally we knew the truth from

these documents. I think that's going to be a lot harder to find with food. And I don't think that strategy will necessarily work. But the strategy of showing them, manipulations, I think, can influence people. I hope it does. Tim, is there anything you feel we've missed in terms of like the key tips that you'd give for trying to get more plants into our diet? We haven't mentioned the concept of diversity. I've found definitely if you try and change people's opinion, you say, okay, try and aim to eat 30 plants a week from the average, which is sort of 10 to 12 plants, and naturally everything else falls into place. And you've get your fiber, you get your diversity, you're feeding lots of fibers to your microbes, and that is a

different mindset. It means adding more to your plate, it's not restricted. It doesn't matter if you add meat or fish or whatever it is, but as long as your plate is full of those 30 plants, all our studies show that your gut microbes are the healthiest. I'd love to finish with one final question, Michael. If someone's listening to this, and you could give them one piece of advice to maybe sort of rekindle their relationship with plants or take it a bit further. What would you say? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And learn to distinguish real food from all this synthetic food that's entered our food supply. And would you add cook? And cook, yes, thank you. Cook and some fermented foods. Yeah. You don't need to know biochemistry to eat well. For thousands of

years, people ate well without it. They relied on culture, right? They ate with their parents ate. And cultures can still guide us. So you don't have to fill your head with science. And these are really basic concepts. I love that. I'd like to do a little summary if that's right and correct me if I get anything wrong. The first thing that I remember is this amazing idea that there was this big Kentucky fried chicken ad saying, here's this big tub of Kentucky fried chicken, this is women's liberation. And there's sort of somehow intersection between this fantastic cultural change and then now abandon everything you've eaten for like this deep fried chicken. And then on sort of following from that, the big food companies have been a big part of

pushing the idea of sort of ready meals as a solution against traditional cooking versus maybe allowing cooking to happen in an easy way, given that both people are working. This has been a huge part of what is sort of mainlined ultra-processed food into our lives. The second thing is this brilliant idea that the coffee break that you get at work is actually companies like giving you a drug and saying, take this so you can be more productive, but we all think it's a great thing. I love this. I've never thought about it like that before.

And then maybe into more of the heart of what we talked about, we talked a lot about ultra-processed food and the way in which this started actually not with the food manufacturers, but actually in the way in which we're growing food. And that when I think about a field of corn, I think that sounds really great and natural. And now you're telling me I can't actually eat this corn at all. It can only be used to go into this incredibly industrialized process to create tons of weird chemical offshoots

rather than anything that looks like food. So I think that's fascinating, that like the way it's industrialized right from the plants that they're growing, which I think is earlier than I had understood, that these food companies are building craven. And so the question is like, do you want to be manipulated? They are making this in order to directly sort of hijack you. And Tim was explaining again, sort of how that works. I love this idea, don't eat food that your grandmother wouldn't recognize. And recognizing that that is hard,

you really need to turn the label over. And then the second thing you're saying is like, you know, if there's a whole bunch of ingredients in there that you have no idea what they are, like this is probably not very good for you. And then I think in terms of, practical rules, I took away. One is try to cook, and that doesn't mean you need to cook everything. Think about like if you could just add one day a week. So if you're not cooking at all, could you cook one day? If you're cooking two days, could you do three? Because almost whatever it is that you choose to cook is likely to be better than like an ultra processed ready meal. So I thought that's really powerful. Then Michael, you slightly updated your famous phrase,

I had definitely heard many times. Eat food, but it needs to be real food. Not too much. Mostly plants. And then you said, well, do we add some fermented plants? And, you know, probably some diversity would be good there as well. And then the last thing which I hadn't heard before, which I thought we were really interesting, was you're saying, we often grew up in the US or the UK to say, like,

are you full before you sit down? But you're saying in Japan, they say, well, eat until you're 80% full. And you're saying in France, the question was, are you satisfied? And just that reframing, you can see, sort of makes you think a little bit less about stuffing yourself to the last moment. Especially with our children, because they're hearing that message. Oh, you're supposed to eat till you're full? That's where we need to practice that. Are you satisfied?

Have you had enough? Are you no longer hungry? I'll end this episode with something I think you'll like, a free Zoe gut health guide. If you're a regular listener, you know just how important it is to take care of your gut. Your gut microbiome is the gateway to better health, better sleep, energy and mood. The list just goes on. But many of us aren't sure how to best support our gut. I wasn't sure before doing Zoe, which is why we've developed an easy-to-follow gut health guide.

It's completely free and offers five simple steps to improve your gut health. You'll get tips from Professor Tim Specter, Zoe's scientific co-founder and one of the world's most cited scientists, plus recipes and shopping list. straight to your inbox. We'll also send you ongoing gut health and nutrition insights, including how Zoe can help. To get your free Zoe gut health guide, head on over to zoe.com slash gut guide. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time.